... funny and moving ... [King] defiantly doubles down on her affection for junk, spinning lovely tales of emotional truth ... She’s also open about infidelity and her history of bedding married men, writing with an invigorating honesty that doesn’t seek to make excuses or apologies nor is she seeking pity or sympathy from her readers ... The emotional breadth of Tacky is stunning, but it must be said that even though there are some aching moments in the book, King also has an expert hand at writing comedy. Tacky is a fun read and King’s writing persona is like that of an impossibly witty and funny friend that you love hanging out with. She can find the absurd in many of her situations and writes them in such a smart, literary, and humorous way, that often readers will find themselves laughing out loud
... here comes Rax King, in her ebullient book Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer, to make the late aughts seem like the most vivid, concrete and ecstatic moment to burst into adolescence since time out of mind ... King’s book is a well-calibrated celebration of 'bad' taste ... That King writes about these things while alluding to Sontag and Updike and Penelope and Odysseus without once seeming like she is otherwise slumming is part of her achievement ... She wears her literacy as if it were a nose stud ... Nor is it new to tuck memoir, wonton-style, inside cultural criticism, which King does. What does feel new — what’s always new, when you find it — is the glitter and squalor and joy and exactness in King’s writing. She’s opposed to distance and irony; you end up taking her seriously because she’s so opposed to the project of being taken seriously ... King writes about herself in the manner Martha Graham taught her dancers to move across the stage: She leads with her crotch. She possesses, in her telling, an incandescent libido, so mighty it could illumine a city’s electrical grid ... reads like sequential shots of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky ... Ode to Warm Vanilla Sugar is in league, as coming-of-age essays go, with Nora Ephron’s A Few Words About Breasts ... So winsome is the writing in Tacky that, most of the time, there’s no other word for it but classy.
These pieces are smart and crass and unapologetic and wildly entertaining ... brings together cultural criticism and the personal essay and combines them into something that is greater than the sum of its parts. By digging into the specificity of her own connections to these seemingly innocuous and/or inane things, King takes the reader on a journey that is equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking ... There are those who might argue that the poignancy and impact of King’s personal explorations are somehow dulled by the pop cultural framework she utilizes, but those people – snobs that they almost certainly are – will have entirely missed the point. It is because of that framework that we can gain a truer understanding of the stories King seeks to tell ... Obviously, your mileage may vary regarding the effectiveness of these essays. There will almost certainly be references that don’t resonate with you over the course of these 14 pieces; I know there were a couple that simply went over my head. But that’s the point – we like what we like and who gives a damn what anyone else thinks? ... a thoughtful and charmingly snarky read; King is a gifted storyteller who is unafraid to aim those gifts squarely at herself – a rare combination. So pull on your snakeskin pants, order up a Crispy Chicken Costoletta and crank up the Creed – Rax King will take it from there.
Most writers are boring people. King, though, seems different: Bettie Page meets Carrie Bradshaw, if Bradshaw supported Bernie Sanders for president and sometimes wore an Old Bay-patterned bikini ... her writing about girlhood and coming of age at the turn of the millennium captures that epoch better than any movie ... The personal and critical elements of the book don’t always line up. And despite its title, Tacky, does not seem all that interested in exploring the implications of tackiness ... This essay collection is not for readers who have no interest in hearing about an author’s sexuality. But those readers will be missing out, because it’s in her writing about sex and sexuality where King’s voice really shines ... Tacky ultimately has less to say about the 'worst culture we have to offer' than it does about the way we make it through the worst of our own lives. There’s much to admire about that—and, for a kind of pop-culture-loving millennial, it will hit all the right notes.
What ultimately matters, for King, is not (just) the garbage itself, but the person who loves them ... Sometimes, the whiplash is jarring, frequently almost surreal. Yet, it is never forced; the juxtapositions make perfect sense ... King’s autobiographical tangents sketch a deeply familiar, and deeply sad, narrative of a child slowly learning that the world quickly turns its mocking fury from bad artists to their vulnerable fans. The first thing King ever hears called tacky is not a thing at all, but a person: her grandmother. It’s not just bad movies and TV and pathetic 2000s boy-rock that needs a champion, but also the people who love them. By offering herself up as a kind of case study, aimed at the project of humanizing tacky people, King humanizes us all, because who among us has successfully resisted the siren song of trash? What King reveals is that our failure to resist reveals the loveliness of our flawed, feeble, and sometimes glorious humanness ... Tacky falls flat when read as a full-throated defense of tackiness as an objective, and objectively good, feature of art. That’s not how King wants it to be read. Read it, instead, as a love letter to tacky people, exactly as they (we) are.
Dishy, memoirish ... King’s writing in this collection often feels impetuous and unpolished. Her sentences...embrace a kind of hyperbole reminiscent of the early aughts internet and its provocations against formality — a subject I wish King had written about. That tone is perfectly on pitch for essays about Degrassi and Hot Topic. It doesn’t work as well when she’s stretching her own thesis ... For King, the freedom to enjoy tackiness seems to go hand in hand with the freedom to be a slut and enjoy it. But much of the book is about habits of consumption, and when King includes blowjobs and threesomes in that, the connection isn’t always clear ... I’m delighted that King hasn’t grown out of her adoration for calorie-rich, nutrient-lite culture ... But I do wish Tacky cared about what tacky really is ... Though she sometimes digs beneath her pet topics to understand why they’re so scorned, she does seem to forget — or purposefully ignore — that 'the worst culture we have to offer' slides up and down the spectrum of wealth.
King’s prose is murderously fizzy, like movie-theater soda pop that dances a little bit in your nostrils right after you’ve taken a sip. At her best, she’s kind of like the Eve Babitz of the Y2K-era shopping mall ... King is so fun on the page that you almost don’t realize how sharp and emotionally observant she can be, too. But such charismatic writing can also charm you into overlooking the book’s critical nearsightedness ... this tactic of inquiry becomes a bit too self-indulgent. As Tacky progresses, what was promised to be an exploration of mass culture becomes, increasingly, a highly specific and occasionally depressing travelogue through King’s sex life ... But if it falls short as a work of criticism, Tacky often excels as deeply felt, vividly conjured memoir. The book’s best and most wrenching essay is sort of about the bacchanalian MTV reality show Jersey Shore, but it’s really about King and her late father watching it together. It is a testament to the kineticism of King’s writing that by the end of the essay, you feel like you knew the guy.
Rax King has paid so much attention to the formative cultural artifacts of her youth that she is able to make me feel as if I have my own memories of experiences we absolutely do not share ... The fact that grief can become tied to the memory of something lighthearted is one that is woven well through her choices of subjects ... Even if some of the specificities of King’s experiences might be foreign to you, as they are to me, the adolescent pangs will not be ... I don’t agree with everything King says...But the throughlines that peek through each essay—the importance of the megacrush, young little luxuries, music that feels too embarrassing to admit to listening to, messy role models—are honest and potent. Her enthusiasm in offering a new perspective to the tacky things we’d sometimes rather let idle on in our memories leaves you a little raw, thinking about the things in your own adolescence you could have enjoyed more if you hadn’t learned so early the most ironic ways to protect your heart when an adult brain and body were 'forcing their way to the surface'.
Charming ... King balances her desire to understand her own past with an examination of America’s cultural propensity for the tawdry ... The emotion that runs throughout makes for a powerful antidote to jaded nonchalance ... King’s witty, conversational dip into nostalgia is a delight.
Vibrant ... In her keen debut, King taps into her lifelong love affair with low culture in this joyful tribute to the tacky ... Throughout, the author connects points in her life to cultural touchstones, showing a fearless willingness to share her personal history and view with readers ... King deploys a reliably consistent blend of humor, emotion, and insight ... An engaging, hilarious, unabashed look at what we love in culture and why we should value it for what it is.
